UPDATED | A day after a New York Police Department effort to engage the public on Twitter turned sour, the commissioner defended the campaign and said it will continue.

Around 2 p.m. Tuesday, @NYPDnews, the official Twitter account for the NYPD, posted a well-meaning tweet asking users to share their photos posing with members of the department. The tweet encouraged using the hashtag #mynypd.

The tweet immediately went viral when people began posting photos officers in alleged acts of police brutality under the hashtag, allowing people to see photos depicting the police in both positive and negative lights in one seemingly endless stream.

In response, Commissioner William Bratton said Wednesday that he welcomed both types of photos. He said the department welcomed “the extra attention.”

“Was that particular reaction from some of the police adversaries anticipated?” Mr. Bratton said. “To be quite frank, it was not, but at the same time it’s not going to cause us to change any of our efforts to be very active on social media”

“We’ll continue to go forward,” he said. “It is what it is. It’s an open, transparent world.”

To ease the tension, Mr. Bratton jokingly pulled out his smart phone and a snapped a picture of the press corps, saying he will tweet it from his account with the #myNYPD hashtag.

Mr. Bratton has made the use of social media one of the cornerstones of the NYPD’s effort to engage with the community. He appointed Zachary Tumin as deputy commissioner of strategic initiatives to oversee the effort.

“I’m as you know a strong supporter and advocate of the social media,” Mr. Bratton said Wednesday. “During my brief time here in the department we have moved aggressively into all those arenas — blogs, Facebook, Twitter, you name it we’re attempting it and will continue to expand our activities in that area.”

Shortly after being sworn in Mr. Bratton created a twitter account, which is manned by a member of the department who crafts tweets on his behalf.

Last week the department began rolling out a pilot program in which five precinct commanders across the city began tweeting news from their neighborhoods. The idea is to give commanders a new avenue to communicate with the public, officials have said.

The decision to request photos grew out of a successful effort earlier this month in which the NYPD received a photo of a uniformed officer helping a blind woman to the cross the street, NYPD spokesman Stephen Davis said. The photo was so well received that a decision was made to solicit more photos of the public interacting with New York City police officers.

“This is a good way to reach out to people,” Mr. Davis said.

For a while the effort seemed to work, but then hashtag went viral with thousands of users posting photos of police officers fighting with citizens. In one, police officers can be seen holding down a photographer. Many photos were scenes from Occupy Wall Street, where on a number of occasions officers and protestors fought.

Asked if the NYPD would seek to have any of the photos taken down, Mr. Bratton said the department would do so only if obscene photos were posted, and that none so far warranted such a request.

“The reality of policing is that oftentimes our activities are lawful, but they look awful, and that’s the reality,” Mr. Bratton said.

“What I have seen so far that came up yesterday, of officers engaged oftentimes in lawful police activities, there’s nothing I saw that I’d be knocking on their door to withdraw,” he said.

With that he said the campaign was “continuing.”

“That hasn’t stopped,” he said, adding, “send us your photos, good or bad.”